The Bottom LineThe SZ-14 represents great value for money for a camera with so long a zoom. Image quality is good, colours are bright and the build quality and menus are excellent. The panorama mode is a little fiddly, but otherwise it's a good job well done.

Of Olympus' latest releases, the SZ-14 is my favourite. It strikes a careful balance between features and size, packing a 14-megapixel sensor and an impressive 24x optical zoom into a chassis roughly the size of a pack of cards.

You can get your hands on one for a typical price of around £180, or you could hunt one down online for as little as £160.

Build quality and features

It looks great and feels just as good. The hand grip is smooth and glossy, but chunky enough to still give good purchase. It's perfectly balanced by a small thumb rest at the back, and the shutter and zoom rocker fall right beneath your index finger. The 24x optical zoom itself is equivalent to 25-600mm on a regular 35mm camera.

Around the back, as well as the usual collection of playback, delete and movie record buttons, there's a small thumbwheel for navigating menus and playing back photos. If you turn it quickly enough during playback mode, the pictures shrink down to a series of thumbnails scattered along a timeline. This is an interesting approach, but the timeline scrolls quite slowly, so you'd actually do better clicking back and forth between your full-screen images instead.

You can shrink down your photos to a timeline of thumbnails, but it's easier to scroll through your shots in full size.

Shooting modes

There's a regular collection of shooting modes, including fully-automatic, scene mode and program auto, the latter of which gives you the most control.

There's a panorama setting too, as you'd expect of a modern point-and-shoot, which has three distinct modes. The manual mode relies on you lining up the edge of your previous shot with the content of the next. PC shoots individual frames for stitching together on your computer. And auto goes some way to automating the process by presenting a target and spot on screen after each shot. Your job in this third setting is to move the camera until the target and spot align, at which point it fires the shutter automatically and stitches the shots together.

Neither is as easy to use as the sweep panorama function championed by Sony and now rolled out across many competitors. I found even the auto setting somewhat hit and miss. I set the SZ-14 the task of capturing a panorama of this outdoor bathing pool:

I chose this overcast bathing pool as the subject for my panorama tests (click image to enlarge).

It soon became obvious you had to be very careful where you stood to avoid getting kinks in the image, and for the target system to recognise that you had indeed moved the camera. If there wasn't sufficient variation in the scene, the target had a tendency to move as you turned the camera through the arc of the scene. This meant that it never lined up with the spot and so the shutter wouldn't fire.

Of our eight attempts, the one below was the most successful. Clicking to reveal the full-size image will show a slight kink in the back wall of the pool, a third of the way in from the right, and a misalignment of the sea wall, a third of the way in from the left.

This is the best of eight attempts to shoot a panorama of the scene from closer quarters. There are still minor imperfections in the result (click image to enlarge).

There's a 3D mode too, but whereas the Olympus VG-170 shoots old-fashioned 'flat' 3D, with red and cyan overlays that you view through bundled glasses, the SZ-14 instead shoots images designed for playback on 3D-enabled TVs. You can hook it up using an HDMI cable.

It uses a similar principle to the panorama shooting mode, which relies on you turning the camera so that your first and second shots overlap, but this time without the spot and target. Instead, it detects for itself when your two frames are in sync.

Test results

Except when using the panorama or 3D settings, I performed all of my tests using the SZ-14's iAuto mode. This chooses the most appropriate exposure and aperture for each shot. In general, it did a good job, although zooming to 100 per cent reveals some very slight dappling, even in well-lit shots taken at low sensitivities.

I started at a deserted fairground where there were plenty of colours and textures. On the whole, the SZ-14 accurately reproduced the vivid tones. However, there was some chromatic aberration on the blades of the red helicopter. That means a fine red fringe is evident, which indicates that the lens hadn't quite lined up each wavelength of the available light at the same point on the sensor.

This scene produced a generally good result, packed with vivid colours, although there was slight colour fringing on the blades of the red helicopter (click image to enlarge).

The fringing effect was more pronounced in this shot of trees, where they overlaid an overcast sky in a local park. Here, it encroaches on the branches themselves to give the tree an overall purple finish.

The fringing on the tree at the back of this scene is quite obvious, resulting in inaccurate purple branches (click image to enlarge).

Its macro performance though was very good, getting as close as 10cm in the regular macro mode and 3cm in super-macro, to reveal a high level of detail. In the image below, edges are sharp, textures are true to the originals and there's plenty of differentiation, even between those parts of the image that are otherwise tonally similar, such as the white petals of these early crocuses.

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Olympus SZ-14

About The Author

Nik Rawlinson has been writing about tech since Windows 95 was looking distinctly futuristic. He is a former Editor of MacUser magazine and one-time scribe for Personal Computer World. Nik is a freelance writer and is not an employee of CNET.